Self-Similar Recursivity Is The Best Scaling Strategy

(via ara t howard)

A Face For Stephen Hawking (Giles Bowkett Remix)

A Face For Richie Hawtin



Ruby-Processing creator Jeremy Ashkenas cooked up a programmatic multimedia piece called "A Face For Stephen Hawking," which generated starfield-like graphics in response to spoken word. After he saw my GoRuCo presentation on Archaeopteryx, he e-mailed me and told me his code works well for music too. Turns out this was very true. So I made a few changes, enough to give it my own spin, and pitted it against a Richie Hawtin mix mp3.

By the way, Ruby-Processing allows you to distribute pre-packaged apps for which the code remains editable. I had wanted to learn Objective-C up until I discovered this; now I just want to write a GUI library for Ruby-Processing. Like RubyCocoa, Ruby-Processing involves a lot of Ruby which looks like another language, but Ruby-Processing seems to do this with less work than RubyCocoa (specifically, without what appears to be a compiler, and with more idiomatic Ruby). Shoes gives you "write once, run anywhere," but it's nowhere near as Apple-friendly.

It's Ruby-Processing FTW here, in a very big way. If Ruby-Processing had a powerful GUI library, I think a lot of people would be very happy to use it to package and distribute applications that had nothing to do with Processing's visualization sweet spot. Prepackaging GUI apps with editable code might be able to give you the best of both worlds - the income of commercial software and the collaboration of open source. You could charge money for consumer apps and still allow consumers to edit the apps, or even give the code away to programmers but charge regular people for the app itself.

I know Ruby programmers who are very skeptical of JRuby for its sheer Javaness, but trust me, there's a win here:



The win is that Ruby-Processing has made Java's "write once, run anywhere" promise actually true. The irony, of course, is that Java couldn't deliver on "write once, run anywhere" until Ruby came to the JVM.

Because Creating jQuery Wasn't Enough

John Resig implemented the Processing visualization language, and its entire 2D drawing API, IN FUCKING JAVASCRIPT USING THE FUCKING CANVAS TAG.

I'M NOT KIDDING.

Ahem.

Sorry.

What I mean is, John Resig implemented the Processing visualization language, and its entire 2D drawing API, in JavaScript, using the <canvas> tag.

Thereafter, no doubt, he wired his heart to a car battery, not to keep himself alive, but just for the hell of it.

Twitter's "Scaling Problems"

There are Rails apps that get a lot more traffic than Twitter. I worked on one of them.

People like to say that Twitter's downtime issues indicate a Rails scaling problem. But if that were the case, sites which receive more traffic would have more downtime. In reality, they have less.

It's therefore very likely that Twitter's downtime issues come from some other source than its use of Rails.

Going further, it's irresponsible to speak of Twitter having a scaling problem. Twitter has an issue with frequent downtime. This may indicate a scaling problem; it may indicate some other problem instead. Without working at Twitter, you'd be hard-pressed to say with any degree of accuracy.

Another Reason To Read Clay Shirky

here comes everybody style science

Ranjit Bhatnagar; Monome; Doc Ock v0.2; Type

Quick links:

Monome comes to Los Angeles

Freaky robot art music

Minor improvements to Doc Ock

Typography Movie:

When It Happens, Remember That You Read It Here First

The joyless insanity of the 1950s largely created the joyful insanity of the 1960s (and the darker sides to it as well).

This didn't happen in the UK, however, because over there, the 50s were never like the American 50s. The 1960s in England were correspondingly not about youthful rebellion, but more simply, the joy of abundance, as decades of postwar food rationing came to an end.

In the UK today, however, the video surveillance is joyless insanity of the purest kind.

The American 1960s were a freak occurence, a perfect storm of many factors, but something similar, though lesser, is probably on the way for England. I can't prove it, but I feel totally sure of it. Joyless insanity led to a generation with utter disregard for existing social norms, and consequently to widespread, dramatic social change; this will probably happen again, in a different place. It has the feel of natural consequence to it.

Clay Shirky described this recently, although he mistakenly assumed it has to happen at the speed of centuries. (In his model gin was the joyless insanity, and all of industrial society's fundamental institutions the social change.)